2010-2011 Western Conference Preview

It was a Saturday afternoon, I was lying in bed sick with the flu, staring up at a ceiling fan blade still spinning four and a half minutes after it had been turned off, and I was considering the nature of the article you’re reading now.

Western Conference Preview.

I pondered the premise and feelings rose up.

Mundane.

Predictable.

Inaccurate.

Subjective.

I was flipping through the mental Rolodex of conference preview articles I’d previously written, trying to find the thread that connected the ones which ended up being most relevant. I think I even wrote an article once about how much I dislike “power ranking style” previews. The thought playing on the front end of my brain that Saturday, like it is as I write this, is that while I’ve been called on to write a conference preview many times, and done so successfully, I don’t really like the nature of them.

They always tend to be stale, inclusive to the point of being irrelevant, and trending just a tad overly optimistic. There has to be a way to make it not suck, I thought to myself before continuing to abuse my bottle of DayQuil. There has to be a way to bridge the gap between the voice inside our head that muses on reality free of pretense, and its inhibited and filtered counterpart that bends to what people thought and said yesterday.

What matters in a conference preview?

No. What matters in in a conference?

What matters? The team that ultimately wins the conference. That’s not always clear, however. What could be considered clear? Well, definitely who’s not winning the conference (yes, I’m looking at you Sacramento).